Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Christoph Boeckle]

I second John's post ;)

There's just another thing I really miss from the old forum: the fact that you could log in from any machine and the unread threads where still correct. Here the last time visited seems to be stored in a cookie on each individual machine.

Trains my memory... :)

[edit: Didn't notice the "mark read" button... so actually there's no problem at all!]

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Love the new software, Clinton. Thanks for all your hard work getting it up and running. I'm not crazy about the font, but you can't please everyone. I do find quote boxes all but unreadable now, though. They're black text on dark purple at what appears to be 4 pixel type. Yeah... I know... bitch bitch bitch. :-)

Quote boxes have been somewhat lightened and the font has been made bigger.

As for the font, what? Here's what you're seeing for a font. Understand that for each font in this list, if you don't have it, it goes to the next font until it finds one you have:

font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

If someone has a better suggestion for fonts, I'll take it. (Note: not if it's serif, so drop that issue.)

Note: Hey, most of you don't have that "Bitstream Vera Sans" font, I know. If you want it, to see how the site looks to me, you can get it here. It's very crisp. I have looked at the site in Verdana (the second choice), and it seems quite nice, too.

[Jack Aidley]

A minor gripe, I know, but I find the colour of visited links hard to distinguish from body text, any chance of a more distinct colour?

Also, could we have unread threads names in bold?

[ffilz]

Am I missing something? When I go into a forum, it's easy to see which threads have new posts, but when I go into the thread itself, I see no indicator of the new posts, so I have to try and remember what I last read.

Frank

[Andrew Morris]

I can't tell which threads are new. Am I missing something?

[Nathan P.]

Warning: this post consists of pure enthusiasm.

I just ran into the "someone has posted since you last read this topic" message, and it's totally awesome. What a fantastic feature. Thanks Clinton!

If you haven't seen it yet, when the page comes up to reply to a thread, if someone posted something between when you loaded the thread to read it and you clicked Reply, a message in big red letters comes up telling you so. Totally Awesome.

I can't tell which threads are new. Am I missing something?

For me, all new topics have a little box next to the thread title on the right-hand side that says "new".

p.s. Still having line-wrapping problems...any possible solutions?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Clinton,

I'm seeing some properly html-coded anchors/links looking like they didn't convert over properly. Check the one in my post here:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=7317.msg77440#msg77440

Paul

[Andrew Morris]

For me, all new topics have a little box next to the thread title on the right-hand side that says "new".

Oh. Yeah. Well...sure, if you want to use the obvious indicator that only a blind person could miss. I meant...something else, of course.

Thanks, Nathan. I can't believe I missed that.

[Edited to add:]
Oh, and I just noticed that the green yin/yang symbol disappears if I've viewed the forum, even if there are still new posts in the forum.

[Shreyas Sampat]

If someone has a better suggestion for fonts, I'll take it. (Note: not if it's serif, so drop that issue.)

Is it particularly hard to set up multiple stylesheets, or allow users to set their own font display preferences? Some people do not share your prejudices.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Read before posting any further in this thread.

This is not a "demand a new feature we didn't have before" thread. I'm looking for technical issues. Not seeing unread posts? Awesome. I'll work on that.

Don't like the fonts? Fixed it once to look a lot like the older Forge. That's that.

I mean, I'm a nice guy. Feel free to suggest things. That's cool. If I see something about my "prejudices," again... well... come on. Did you really intend to come off like such a jerk?

Haven't any of you guys heard of "thank you?"

(By the way, on the font tip: it's the policy of the Forge, set long ago by Ron and I, that there would be a unified user experience. That policy would have to change before we went making all sorts of "have it your way" changes. The sans serif bit is part of that: all studies show that sans serif fonts are easier to read on a computer screen. Also, there's this thing called Greasemonkey you can use with Firefox. That'll do the trick for you.)

[Eric Provost]

Thank you Clinton!

-Eric

[John Harper]

Thanks for addressing the font issue, Clinton. Especially the quote boxes. Much, much easier to read now.

Sadly, all the fonts look good now, except the body copy of a post. It's being rendered in this strange way that I have not seen before, which makes me think it is trouble on my end (though no other webpages display this way). The font appears "dotty" for lack of a better term. But as far as I can tell, it's just Verdana. Bizarre.

Here are some images to show what I mean:

Forge font (image):


Text from 20x20 Room (image):


The second looks very crisp. Anyone know what's causing this? Is it just me? I'm running Firefox on Windows XP and I installed the font Clinton suggested.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Sadly, all the fonts look good now, except the body copy of a post. It's being rendered in this strange way that I have not seen before, which makes me think it is trouble on my end (though no other webpages display this way). The font appears "dotty" for lack of a better term. But as far as I can tell, it's just Verdana. Bizarre.

Here are some images to show what I mean:

Forge font (image):


Verdana from 20x20 Room (image):


Anyone know what's causing this? Is it just me? I'm running Firefox on Windows XP.

Huh. Definitely on the "need to investigate further" list. Looking at the CSS, I can't see why that'd be happening.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I mean, I'm a nice guy. Feel free to suggest things. That's cool. If I see something about my "prejudices," again... well... come on. Did you really intend to come off like such a jerk?

Yeah, actually I did. I was responding in kind to what I felt was a dismissive comment on your part.

Now, if Forge policy is that you want to have a unified user experience, that's fine. I wasn't previously aware of that. I'm familiar with third-party methods of forcing my own styles onto web sites; I was simply examining options that are less brute-force and more beneficial to a larger portion of users, who may prefer various different display options regardless of the claims of studies.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Here's what I'm going to do on the font issue. All fonts will be set up to use your default sans-serif font first, and then your default serif font. If you really hate sans-serif fonts, you can set your default sans-serif font in your browser preferences to be a serif font. (Really, you can.) Thusly, everyone picks their own font to look at the site in and hopefully you won't all flip out.

None of this indicates Shreyas' comments above were appropriate in any way. They were not, and I would appreciate it if the tone around here got cleaned up a bit.